"What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened."

Tom Stoppard Literature See all quotes by Tom Stoppard →

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“Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.”

“(an anguished cry): Consistency is all I ask! (low, wry rhetoric): Give us this day our daily mask.”

“All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.”

“We’re more of the blood, love and rhetoric school. Well, I’ll leave the choice to you, if there is anything to choose between them. They’re hardly divisible, sir—well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood, you see.”

“Maidens aspiring to godheads— And vice versa—”

“We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The way to secure success, is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it; the surest hindrance to it is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opini…"

— William Hazlitt

Literature1778–1830

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"Going in and out of a song, you know you might just be good enough to improvise a little bit when you’re playing live when you haven’t recorded a song, but then you get a chord and you say, oh, that l…"

— Billy Boyd (actor)

Music1968

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"I smiled, remembering Art's line about doctors being illpolitical. He meant it the way you used words like illiterate. Art always said doctors not only held no political views, but also were incapable…"

— Michael Crichton

Literature1942–2008

#philosophy

"She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with …"

— Virginia Woolf

Literature1882–1941

#life